Editorial

TO DECRIMINALIZE THE USE OF DRUGS, PART 2 OF A SERIES

Ask police officers to guess how much drug traffic goes undetected, and
many will roll their eyes. Whatever the benchmark -- the number of charges
laid, the quantity of drugs seized, the property crimes committed to feed
drug habits -- only a fraction of the full picture is ever visible.

Perhaps 5 per cent of the heroin, cocaine and designer drugs smuggled into
this country each year is intercepted. A similarly dismal success rate
probably applies to Canada's massive hydroponic marijuana industry, which
each year dispatches hundreds of tonnes of the drug across our porous
southern border.

The illegal-drug industry, in short, has become a behemoth. The United
Nations calculates that globally it is worth up to $400-billion (U.S), an
astonishing 8 per cent share of world trade. Estimates of Canada's share
start at around $7-billion (Cdn.). At street level, the RCMP has placed the
value of sales at about $18-billion.

As for the cost of chasing all those drugs, that too is guesswork. In the
United States, the annual cost of paying for police, courts and
imprisonment has been pegged at about $30-billion (U.S.); the price tag in
Canada is probably about one-10th of that.

As most police will also tell you, those resources often end up being
directed not at major-league drug dealers, but at much smaller fry and
their customers far down the drug chain. Often such charges happen by
chance -- incurred during the investigation of a driving offence, for
instance, or a domestic dispute. Sometimes they happen by design, as in a
police sweep through a drug-ravaged public housing complex.

But after the police leave that complex, the problem remains. Low-level
drug sweeps are akin to stepping on a soft balloon; the dealers simply
scurry elsewhere for a while. In the meantime, the individuals who have
been netted will be on their way to court, and possibly prison, where they
can learn new criminal skills.

That's not the entire picture. Toronto's special drug-diversion court,
still one of a kind in Canada, strives with some success to spare hard-core
non-violent drug users that prison experience, by substituting treatment
and counselling. Yet all estimates are that this worthy program, to be
emulated in Vancouver, Montreal and Ottawa, can do no more than scratch the
surface.

What if the police had different marching orders? What if buying and using
drugs, as opposed to selling them, were no longer a criminal offence, but
were treated as a health issue and accorded all the necessary funding? What
if simple drug possession were reclassified as a misdemeanour, regarded
with the same seriousness as speeding or jaywalking? What if the long-term
strategy were grounded in a blend of first-rate health care, drug education
and community policing?

Law-enforcement priorities would change radically. Instead of arresting
hapless drug-takers (whose lives are often already difficult enough),
police could rechannel their resources into the vastly more meaningful task
of catching the big players, including the organized crime figures who
control much of the hydroponic marijuana trade.

Indeed, the sheer scale of that marijuana-export industry has already
helped create such a shift. For several years, police in Canada have not
been required to fingerprint pot possessors found with less than 30 grams.
In some parts of the country, notably British Columbia's Lower Mainland,
the tolerance goes further, with small-scale possession of marijuana and
hashish routinely ignored by police or shrugged at by the courts.
Elsewhere, such leniency remains patchwork, which is why thousands of
marijuana-smoking Canadians still get saddled with criminal records each year.

The laissez-faire attitude toward cannabis possession offers a model that
could be extended to all other drugs, including those much more dangerous
than cannabis. Such a move would stir the accusation that the people most
vulnerable to drugs were being abandoned to predatory drug dealers. Yet for
those drug users who want to snort cocaine or inject heroin, the real
hazards might be no greater than under the status quo. Why? Because most
empirical evidence indicates that if a person really wants drugs, of
whatever type, he or she will be able to get them.

If it is accepted that drugs are a social ill that can never be eradicated,
the door opens to a much more selective brand of law enforcement than
currently prevails. Drug dealers would remain subject to harsh, highly
specific penalties. Plenty of them would be deterred from selling even
small amounts of hard drugs to minors, for instance, if such an offence
automatically meant a 10-year penitentiary term.

That said, there is no avoiding the possibility that decriminalizing
personal drug use might lead to wider experimentation. We would argue,
however, that for most drug users, greater damage is incurred through being
arrested, fined and possibly imprisoned. A bad drug experience may last
only a day or two. The same is not true of a criminal record, or of the
lasting damage incarceration commonly inflicts.